This exhibition is the result of a year-long sabbatical taken during the 2021-2022 academic year. The goal of my sabbatical was to explore the notions of consciousness, particularly our tangled perceptions of reality in the duration of time between our sleeping and waking minds. I then planned to produce a series of relievo ambrotypes derived from those studies. Each relievo ambrotype layers two photographs to create a single image. The top ambrotype photograph is created on glass using the wet-plate collodion process, while the bottom print is made from a digital image. The relievo ambrotype procedure is a very involved process that necessitates several stages and is quite time consuming. It requires several days to complete a single image. The camera in this exhibition is the one I used to make the glass plate ambrotypes.

To create a foundation from which to build my photographic work, I turned to a collection of related books and articles. My research was broad and deep, and included works by philosophers, psychologists, cosmologists, poets, historians, and of course, photographers. My investigation also included books I was researching for the new Spirit Photography course I am offering in the spring of 2023. While doing my preliminary exploration my ideas, interests, and approach evolved. I am still very much interested in consciousness, but it has shifted toward the ways in which we each individually construct our own consciousness and how we use that personal understanding to comprehend the universe and our place in it.

Spirit Photography was a 19th century photographic practice that developed parallel with the rise of “Spiritualism.” Spiritualism is a metaphysical school of thought that espouses the belief that consciousness transitions to another place after death, and that it is possible to commune with those who had transitioned, or died. As spiritualism grew, psychics or trance mediums conducted seances during which the living believed they could communicate with the dead. Spirit Photography was a natural outgrowth of Spiritualism in which bereaved individuals sat for portraits that would result in photographs of themselves with a ghostly visage of their dearly departed hovering nearby. The most common sitters were those who had recently lost family or friends in the U. S. Civil War. Among them was Mary Todd Lincoln who, after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, sat for a portrait in which a ghostly aura of her husband hovered over her shoulders. Spirit photography remained popular until the early 20th century when the practice was widely debunked as fraudulent trickery.

Although the Spiritualism-driven, commercial practice of Spirit Photography ceased to be popular, the notion of photographing spirit was taken up by numerous photographers and is still practiced today. The concept of spirit however, has evolved from deceitful attempts to communicate with the dead, to more subtle and nuanced explorations that may not necessarily claim to photograph spirit, as much as intone spirit as a muse, or embed photographs with spirit. Some photographers see their practice as an act of Zen meditation, developing deep metaphysical relationships with the subject of their photographs.

One such photographer was Minor White. In his book, Mirrors, Messages and Manifestations, White discusses his methodology in sequencing photographs. What interested him was not how each individual photograph is interpreted by viewers, but what happens in the viewers’ mind as their attention moves from one photograph to another. What happens in the blank space in between the photographs? Is there a spirit that courses back and forth between the sequenced images? This notion of a personal or individual “spirit” transmuting between images is endlessly fascinating and has profoundly affected my practice.

After four years as chair of the Fine Arts (now the Visual & Performing Arts) department my artistic practice atrophied. At the beginning of my sabbatical, I struggled to simply see photographically. In my initial forays into my studio, I found that I was taking pictures, not making photographs. Because the relievo ambrotype process is so complicated, I turned to the immediacy of digital photography to streamline my artistic practice and simply to look more. I could make hundreds of digital photographs in a single day. It took weeks to nurture and rekindle my belief in my own photographic intuition, to trust myself to make aesthetically risky decisions, to allow myself to fail and yet believe in the long view of my practice. My collection of digital photographs was so significant that I have included several of them without pairing them with ambrotypes. They are however grouped to enable a conversation between the images.

After reawakening my photographic visions, I returned to making relievo ambrotypes. My approach to the relievo photograph, which merges two distinct photographs into a single image, is the perfect opportunity to explore this idea of how viewers can incant their own spirit that moves between two disparate images. Rather than completing a body of work during my sabbatical, I have opened a new chapter in my practice.